Edge AI-Enabled Chicken Health Detection Based on Enhanced FCOS-Lite and Knowledge Distillation

• Published in: arXiv.org 2024-11
• Main Authors: Tong, Qiang, Wang, Jinrui, Yang, Wenshuang, Wu, Songtao, Zhang, Wenqi, Chen, Sun, Xu, Kuanhong
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Cameras; CMOS; Distillation; Knowledge management; Lightweight; Performance measurement; Poultry; Real time operation; Sensors; Weight reduction
• ISSN: 2331-8422
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2407.09562

The utilization of AIoT technology has become a crucial trend in modern poultry management, offering the potential to optimize farming operations and reduce human workloads. This paper presents a real-time and compact edge-AI enabled detector designed to identify chickens and their healthy statuses using frames captured by a lightweight and intelligent camera equipped with an edge-AI enabled CMOS sensor. To ensure efficient deployment of the proposed compact detector within the memory-constrained edge-AI enabled CMOS sensor, we employ a FCOS-Lite detector leveraging MobileNet as the backbone. To mitigate the issue of reduced accuracy in compact edge-AI detectors without incurring additional inference costs, we propose a gradient weighting loss function as classification loss and introduce CIOU loss function as localization loss. Additionally, we propose a knowledge distillation scheme to transfer valuable information from a large teacher detector to the proposed FCOS-Lite detector, thereby enhancing its performance while preserving a compact model size. Experimental results demonstrate the proposed edge-AI enabled detector achieves commendable performance metrics, including a mean average precision (mAP) of 95.1\(\%\) and an F1-score of 94.2\(\%\), etc. Notably, the proposed detector can be efficiently deployed and operates at a speed exceeding 20 FPS on the edge-AI enabled CMOS sensor, achieved through int8 quantization. That meets practical demands for automated poultry health monitoring using lightweight intelligent cameras with low power consumption and minimal bandwidth costs.